Blogs

Thanks to our special guest Jason Buffington of ESG for hosting our latest Twitter Chat discussing Office 365 Data Protection. We had a great discussion online around the challenges, risks and important considerations in protecting your data in SaaS applications like Office 365. You can find a Storify version of the chat below.

Also as promised, one lucky winner was selected in a random draw to win a Sphero 2.0. Congratulations go to: @jayashram. We’ll be in touch with you shortly to discuss how to redeem your prize.

Thanks to everyone who joined us during our chat and we’ll see you next time!

Cloud Expo Europe (ExCeL Exhibition Center, London, United Kingdom) is the biggest and best attended cloud event in the world and is happening this year—March 11th to 12th. Asigra will be exhibiting in Stand #822 and presenting. During the session, executive Vice President Eran Farajun and other industry experts will discuss the different security implications of Private, Public and Hybrid cloud for service providers, telcos and cloud ecosystems. You can attend the session on Wednesday March 11th from 1:50pm – 2:30pm. (Conference theatre: Service Provider and Cloud Ecosystems – Business)

If you’d like to book a private meeting with Asigra during the event, you can make a request here, and we’ll respond within 1 business day.

Drop by our Stand to say hello and learn about our Recovery License Model along with our cloud to cloud capabilities to backup MS Office 365! We’ll see you in London.

For managed service providers (MSPs) it can be confusing, time consuming and exhausting selecting the right partner, among the myriad of available choices on the market, to offer secure, reliable service to their customers. During this live interactive webinar on March 5th, 2015 2:00pm ET/11:00am PT, Asigra’s EVP Eran Farajun and CEO of Armada Backup, Michael McCarthy will walk you through 7 steps to consider in choosing the right cloud backup services partner, so that you can ultimately meet the data protections needs of SMBs and Enterprise.

In addition to the 7 steps, Eran and Michael will also make recommendations on selection criteria emphasizing why technology isn’t the only factor to consider when choosing a business partner.

If you’re a managed service provider, who is looking to add cloud backup services to your portfolio then register for this webinar below:

With the recent release of Asigra Cloud Backup™ Version 13, publications have extensively covered our latest announcement while highlighting the new features that are included in Version 13. You can learn more about our coverage by viewing the corresponding LookBook:

With the myriad of benefits gained from virtualized environments it’s no wonder why virtualization has become a staple of the modern enterprise data center. As the usage of Virtual Machines (VMs) becomes more widespread, the need for VM data protection also becomes more and more prominent. But not all use cases for VM backup are the same; different VMs will have widely different protection needs. Whether a VM is dedicated to mission critical production workloads or is assigned to something like a snapshot of a production database used for testing, IT admins must decide on how they want to protect their VM data. So how does an IT professional sort out these environments in the easiest and most cost effective way?

A Smart Approach

The latest version of Asigra Cloud Backup™ addresses the need for IT admins to backup their VMs in the most efficient manner. Instead of relying on complex and costly point solutions, found in many existing IT environments, Asigra provides a spectrum of VM protection options. Asigra Cloud Backup Version 13 lets you backup and restore as well as replicate VMs on-site or to the cloud and gives you the flexibility to set the level of protection on a VM by VM basis according to your business and application need. So in the above scenario, Asigra will make it possible for you to protect your VMs according to your different use cases. On top of that, Asigra is a comprehensive solution, where you can manage all of your backups from a single tool and interface in order to manage both VM and non-VM data sources.

Comprehensive VM Backups

VMs are like any other data source in that data losses happen. In some instances the data loss could be expected, in the case where a VM contains a customer contact database that is updated over time with older records being overwritten. Or in other cases, the data loss could come as a surprise where an end user might have accidentally deleted a file on the VM. In either case, the impact to the organization can be severe. For those reasons, Asigra Cloud Backup helps you mitigate your risks by giving you the option to take unlimited point in time backups of VMs across your organization. Plus you can define rules on a per-VM basis that will automatically take as few or as many backups as you wish, thus enabling you to meet your recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Minimize Downtime with VM Replication

Some organizations require the need to replicate mission critical applications with urgent recovery time objectives (RTOs); for example, a company that relies on an ecommerce website. By maintaining a replica VM, if a primary production site fails, a replica VM can take over with minimal delay and the site can be up and running quickly. In these cases the time it takes to get the VM replica up is crucial. Asigra Cloud Backup V13 supports this use case by including VM replication for VMware. By leveraging snapshots, Asigra Cloud Backup can have your replica up and running in as little as 5 minutes or less. VM replication can be combined with VM backup to give you the benefits of both types of data protection.

In conclusion, the key thing to remember about Asigra Cloud Backup is that it gives you the flexibility to choose the right level of protection for all the VMs in your organization without adding complexity to your IT processes the way VM data protection point solutions do.

You can learn more about the many business benefits of Asigra Cloud Backup V13 for your virtualized environments by downloading our VM protection data sheet

For Service Providers, the costs and complexities that are associated with providing Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) are becoming directly impacted by increasing infrastructure costs. That is, it’s difficult to manage the costs and complexities if one is locked into expensive vendor-specific hardware and software. As a Service Provider, it’s difficult to justify your increased costs to your customers when you have to charge a premium because you run your data protection software on expensive, brand-name infrastructure. In this blog post, we will review the alternatives available for Service Providers to lower their infrastructure costs.

Introducing SDDP

Asigra Cloud Backup™ V13 runs on a wide variety of infrastructure, including open source systems. By giving Service Providers a virtually platform independent approach to providing secure, reliable data protection services across an entire organization--this is the ultimate flexibility in managing infrastructure costs while minimizing complexity.

Leverage FreeBSD and ZFS for Lower Infrastructure Costs

In the latest release of Asigra Cloud Backup, our DS-System back-end application, which manages data in the data center, is now capable of running on a number of different platforms, including FreeBSD Unix and the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) that comes bundled with FreeBSD. With FreeBSD and ZFS being open source, this eliminates license costs, enabling Service Providers to run applications on commodity hardware, giving them the flexibility to standardize on low cost physical servers and storage. In Q2 2015, Asigra will be accommodating the benefits of FreeBSD and ZFS by introducing an Asigra SDDP appliance that comes pre-configured and optimized for data protection workloads, and includes full support from Asigra’s world class 24x7 dedicated support team.

Read our data sheet to learn how to lower your total infrastructure costs, increase your margins and pass long additional business benefits to your customers.

For most of us, our smart phones have become a second skin. Besides my wallet, and my keys, there isn’t a place I go without my phone. In 2014, according to IDC reports, nearly 1.3 Billion smart phones were shipped. Not to mention the influx of endpoints devices that are encroaching office environments; in 2013, it was estimated that six out of ten executives were using tablets. With that said, what happens when these devices are either stolen or go missing? And what happens if there is sensitive corporate information contained on those devices?

Blurred Lines

If you ask an IT administrator about their thoughts around endpoint device adoption in the office, they’ll probably cringe. After all, precious corporate data residing on these devices creates a multitude of threats. Beyond a stolen device, the value of the data on the device itself is something that can provide a high return for potential thieves. Or if it isn’t a thief, maybe it’s the carelessness of a senior executive who misplaces their iPhone which contains highly sensitive and confidential corporate information, at their local café. The point is, once sensitive data is stored on a mobile device, the opportunity for that data to go missing increases, wherever that device might be, either at work or at home.

I’ll Just Work from Anywhere

And beyond working at home, one must also consider the new trends of working in the field where smart phones and tablets have become more prominent and critical to business operations; such as insurance field adjusters, medical professionals and any profession that supports the use of laptops. The possibilities are endless for data to either get stolen or to be misplaced.

Asigra’s V13 Introduces New Endpoint Security Features

At Asigra, we understand the need to protect data across all devices, including smart phones, laptops and tablets, is critical for businesses and IT administrators. To protect this data, Asigra has incorporated data loss prevention features into its latest release, Asigra Cloud Backup™ V13, to ensure data stays where it’s suppose to stay.

Geo-location Targeting

To start, Geo- location functionality enables IT admins to quickly locate mobile devices while leveraging Google maps. So the next time a senior executive happens to misplace their phone and call IT, the exact location of the phone can quickly be identified.

Remote Wipe

Or if worse comes to worse, and the device isn’t retrievable, we’ve introduced a Remote Wipe capability that entirely wipes the critical data (specified by your backup sets) from the device. And if you’re using Asigra Cloud Backup, as an IT admin, you’ll be rest assured that you have a backup copy of that data.

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Integration

Finally, for those IT admins that are working with Microsoft SCCM, Asigra’s V13 integrates with SCCM to ensure the ease of deployment of thousands of endpoint devices. So the next time your senior executive comes to you in a panic about a lost device, you can feel confident, that with Asigra Cloud Backup V13, your data is in good hands.

With more and more organizations integrating Software as a Service applications like Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps and Salesforce.com, the recent trend in cloud adoption highlights the importance of understanding data priorities. It’s one thing for a company like Microsoft to handle your data, it’s another for you to ensure that your data is protected at all times.

In most cases, your backup needs are low on the list of SaaS application providers; that is, they have to ensure they meet their own customer SLAs and uptime. As an IT or SaaS admin however, you have your own backup SLAs and your own needs when it comes to protecting your data created and stored in cloud apps. Which begs the question, what happens when you need a backup copy of your data stored in a SaaS application? Does it even exist?

You are Ultimately Responsible for Your Data

A recurring theme at Asigra has been our everlasting belief that at the end of the day an organization is ultimately responsible for their data, wherever it may live. You would think that this would go without saying, but the advent of cloud subscription services has inevitably removed control from the hands of many IT administrators. And if there’s one thing that IT admins want, it’s full control of their data. For example with Exchange Online, let’s consider that an employee may have deleted an email permanently. Is there a way to get that email back? What if they deleted it from their trash folder or the sent folder? Or what if there was a glitch in a network that caused that email to vanish? And what if that email was critical to a major project or to the company?

Terms and Conditions Shades of Gray

According to Microsoft’s Terms and Conditions, Microsoft will compensate you for lost data but only up to $5K or subscriptions paid for the last 12 months and only if you can prove that the data loss occurred because of an error as a result of Microsoft’s infrastructure. However, aside from that remuneration, the data isn’t necessarily recovered. This might be fine for some organizations, but for other industries and jurisdictions, there are much larger fines and consequences, if during an audit you can’t present requested pieces of information such as an email or document. Litigation scenarios could potentially apply to everyone: consider the disgruntled employee who leaves the company and without warning brings forth a lawsuit against your organization. If you deleted their cloud email box for instance, then it’s hard to recover an email trail when you will most likely need that essential evidence.

Comprehensive Office 365 Data Protection

Asigra Cloud Backup™ V13 provides IT and SaaS administrators with the capability of creating backup sets that will protect Office 365 data including Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online and One Drive. With the ability to protect mailboxes in mass, IT admins will be able to mass deploy their backup sets to hundreds of mailboxes at once. Also options are available to recover SaaS data either back into the cloud or to any secure third party location of your choice. Already supported with Asigra Cloud Backup is the protection of Google Apps and Salesforce. With the backup support for Office 365, organizations can now treat SaaS data with the same level of priority as their local data with a single comprehensive solution.

To learn more about the business benefits of Asigra Cloud Backup Version 13 download our product brochure or for more information on Backup for Office 365 check out our product data sheet.

Senior Analyst Jason Buffington of ESG talks Software as a Service data protection in this latest ESG video. With the leading trend in the IT world being the move to cloud based services, new questions, concerns and strategies arise that impact both backup and SaaS administrators. Watch the video in full to learn:

Why production workloads are moving to SaaS applications like Salesforce, Google Apps and Office 365 and require necessary protection

Why decentralization in the IT workforce means backup admins need to collaborate more efficiently with SaaS admins to protect business critical data

Why most backup and recovery solutions DO NOT backup SaaS applications

The 3 realities for backup admins in a SaaS World

The 3 reasons why being responsible for your own data is the only option you have

We’re proud to announce the latest release of our award winning software Asigra Cloud Backup™ Version 13. Version 13 includes converged data protection for Cloud-Based DR and Backup of Physical, Virtual, Cloud and Mobile Environments. Among the many features added in version 13 are Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) enablement, featuring VMware vSphere replication, mobile endpoint data loss prevention, support for Office 365 and Docker Containers, open infrastructure support for FreeBSD on ZFS and CentOS and integration with Linear Tape File System (LTFS) for low cost long term retention of backup data.

With organizations burdened by the complexity of their data protection needs and challenges, Asigra Cloud Backup Version 13 offers a converged platform that delivers a single comprehensive solution for all data located on physical servers, virtual machines, mobile endpoints and cloud applications.

Here’s a look at some of the new features that are included:

Converged Data Protection - More integrated options for DR, backup/recovery, backup archiving and security; which will minimize complexity in your IT environments and reduce costs.

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service Enablement - To meet the most demanding RTOs, version 13 includes VMware vSphere replication for the ultimate in data protection. Replicate without backup, to one or more warm, on or offsite replicas. Asigra eliminates the need for 3rd party VM replication solutions or special skills to manage and maintain the alternate solutions.

Optimized Support for Open Infrastructure - Version 13 includes optimized support for open infrastructure choices like FreeBSD on ZFS and CentOS running on commodity hardware servers and storage. With these options, you can keep infrastructure costs under control.

Linear Tape File System (LTFS) Integration - Version 13 provides automated parking of old backup data to LTFS tape via the Asigra BLM Archiver to make it easy for aligning the cost of protection to the value of data.

Docker Container Backup/Recovery - With the enormous popularity of Docker and the rapid deployment of applications on the open source platform, Version 13 provides comprehensive protection for application data in these environments, on-premise and in the cloud.